Is There Any Humane Way to Kill a Mouse?

By Tom Huth, The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2018

Uncaptioned image from article

Glue traps, snap traps or poison? What do you do about a pest whose only crime is being a pest?

BOULDER, Colo. — Recently I moved into a furnished apartment in a 100-year-old house at the edge of downtown. Lively location. Jazzy artwork. Laid-back landlord.

After several days, I noticed a putrid smell in the kitchen. Reluctantly, I poked my head under the sink, and there on the concrete slab was a poignant tableau: a still-life with rodents. Lying side by side were two plastic trays slathered with a thick gummy substance, and marooned in that goop were the figures of two gray mice whose tiny feet, captured midstride, had been stilled forevermore.

We had come up with a ghastly way, it seemed, to assassinate immigrants from nature. The product was Ultra-Kill Large Glue Traps, and the labeling advised: “Not an Instant-Kill Trap. Animal may still be alive when trap is checked. Please humanely euthanize animal.”

With a hammer? A cleaver? An ice pick?

My victims had already met their maker. Their corpses lay spread-eagle across the trays, flattened into the glue from tail to belly to head, their once-perky noses pinned fast. Who knew what they expected to find when they scampered onto the trays?

The instructions suggested: “Do not place traps where birds and nontarget animals may come into contact.” This covered, presumably, kittens and toddlers. And they concluded with a refreshing frankness: “Consider other traps for a more humane option.”

But was there any humane way to get rid of pests? These two mice, their only crime was to be mice.

Rather than sitting around moping about their fate, I went to McGuckin Hardware to see what “a more humane option” might look like. I found the Traps/Bait aisle teeming with devices to murder or repel both mice and rats.

Here were the wooden snap traps of old, with their trip pedals and spring-loaded guillotines. A buck 99, and humane in their efficiency: the blow instantaneous, out of nowhere. Plus, the mice got to spend their last moments of mousehood with their nibblers full of cheese.

Poison was another old reliable — d-Con Pro bragged: “Guaranteed to kill.” But who knew how much they suffered first.

Some of the products here were intended not to kill, but to drive varmints crazy. An attic light bulb gave off “sonic waves”; these have the effect of “irritating rodents, causing them to leave the area.” An ultrasonic gadget showed a mouse hopping downstairs toward the nearest exit. Another device employed essential oils to “trigger escape/avoidance behavior.”

You tell me: Is it O.K. to annoy and harass mice?

Finally, I found a solution that exuded compassion: the live-capture trap. It was simple: a 1-by-1-by-6-inch black plastic box with a crook in the middle. The mouse was lured inside by a dab of peanut butter at the far end (“peanut butter not included”), and its advancing weight tipped the box forward to shut the door behind it

I heard a clerk tell a customer: “Don’t take them out and just let them go. They’ll come right back in. Take them like three miles away, at least. And still they might find their way back. Because your home is their home.”

Live capture, then, wasn’t so lovey-dovey, after all. You were kidnapping the critters in their own houses. You were locking them in solitary without a hint of whether they’d ever taste freedom again. Then you were taking them far away from all they had ever known and dumping them in some barren meadow, nowhere near the kitchen crumbs that had saved them from famine.

If I were a mouse, I’d choose the guillotine.

Tom Huth is the author of “Forty Years Stoned: A Journalist’s Romance.”